And I don’t think you know me.

I want to be careful how I say this, because it is easy to make it sound worse than it was, and the truth is stranger and sadder than a bad marriage.

Hal was a good man.

He had never raised his hand or his voice to me, never strayed, never once in forty years given me a concrete thing to point to and say, there, that is the wound. We had no villain in our story, which turned out to be the whole problem, because a wound you can name is a wound you can tend, and what we had instead was an absence, a slow leak, a marriage that had gone flat the way a tire goes flat over months, so gradually that you keep driving on it and telling yourself it’s fine right up until the day you’re sitting on the shoulder wondering how you got there.

Nobody had done anything to us.

That was the terrible part.

We had simply stopped — stopped reaching, stopped asking, stopped dancing — one small omission at a time, over twenty-five years, until the stopping added up to two strangers at a breakfast table, and there was no one to blame and nothing to forgive, only a vast accumulated quiet that we had built together, brick by unspoken brick, and called a marriage.

Chapter 2 — How We Met

I met Hal Delahunt at a dance hall in 1983, which sounds like a made-up detail from an old movie, but it is simply true, and it mattered more than I understood at the time.

I was twenty-two.

He was twenty-four, in a borrowed jacket, and he could not dance to save his life, and he asked me anyway, and stepped on my feet the entire song, and apologized so earnestly and laughed at himself so easily that I danced the next one with him too.

That was the thing about Hal, the thing I fell in love with: he was not smooth, he was not slick, he was a big shy careful man who did the brave thing badly rather than the safe thing well.

We danced every weekend that whole first year.

He got better; I taught him; by our wedding he could actually lead, could turn me under his arm and catch me coming back, and there is a photograph somewhere of the two of us at our reception mid-spin, both of us laughing, that I could not look at now without my throat closing.